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Forum:2018-02-28 (Wednesday)
Discussion for comic for . Bored? Looking for something useful to do? There's plenty of wiki editing you can do. ---- Hah, I thought so! Albia expected Luheia to live forever. I bet "our sister queen" wasn't just a metaphor. Note too that as of panel 5 she has unambiguously green hair. ➤ Speaking of "as of panel 5," what's with her changes of clothes? Unless it's just to show off that she can do it, as mysterious-IPV6-poster would no doubt say. ☺ (I figured it out, see below.) Speaking of leftover discussions from Monday, Zeetha agrees with y'all that the Monolith is in the same category as the queenly mirrors. ➤ So, of course, the main thing is, what about this "god" business? Too bad the lettering is in all caps, so we can't tell quite how much weight to put on this. It could be anything from "some spark(s) figured out how to become immortal" to "a race of godlike immortal beings used to rule Earth, and only a few, maybe only one, remain(s)." The former is what everyone has been assuming, including M. Voltaire. But van Rijn tried and failed, and even the Storm King survived only in stasis, not really living through the time. Albia is certainly not a God in the sense of an omnipotent being, otherwise (I assume) England wouldn't be submerged, despite Moonbark's oration about how it's a good thing. And she wouldn't need magic mirrors to go visiting. But, what do I know, maybe Albia is related to the Dreen. ➤ Things to note in passing: England is racially integrated. That Anevka-like clank is still with us. Now that it's up close. the lion is lion-sized, but still quadripedal. I guess that yellow blobby stuff in the first panel is her costume changing before our eyes. Oh wait, I'm stupid, in panels 1-4 she's wearing her mourning outfit after hearing that Luheia is dead. But she can't stay sad for long, so she switches to her Skifandrian outfit (or maybe her immortal-goddess outfit?) ➤ And the other big thing to think about is her final "WHAT?!" I guess she's surprised that a passage could be other than instantaneous, but is that her entire thought? Or does she understand how a passage could take time? Bkharvey (talk) 05:25, February 28, 2018 (UTC) : Alternate possibility: she wasn't aware there was a monolith/mirror in Mechanicsburg. --Geoduck42 (talk) 05:36, February 28, 2018 (UTC) :: Would learning of one more mirror merit boldface, italics, and double punctuation? ➤ :: Another alternate possibility: she is reacting to learning that the mirrors aren't all dark. Jagerdraught Braumeister (talk) 15:51, March 1, 2018 (UTC) P.S. "She can't stay sad for long" strikes me as additional evidence that she's not all that smart. Or maybe it'll turn out that time goes really ''slowly for her, and this is her five-year-old human-equivalent self. Bkharvey (talk) 05:41, February 28, 2018 (UTC) : She's several centuries old. Other people dying isn't as much of a shock when you've seen it happen for hundreds of years. Why are you so bent on saying she's stupid? She's a Spark. She's a genius by definition. MasakoRei (talk) 06:49, February 28, 2018 (UTC) :: If she hadn't taken the trouble to dress in mourning in the first place, I'd agree with you. But, okay maybe "stupid" isn't quite the right word, maybe it's "immature." But her whole personality just seems off to me, in small details, yes, but several of them. And, she was a Spark 200+ years ago. What's she done lately? She might not be as smart as she used to be. I wish Wooster or somebody had explained England to Agatha earlier. Bkharvey (talk) 06:56, February 28, 2018 (UTC) ::: She wore mourning clothes to express her regrets of things lost, then she dressed in Skifandrian clothes to express her joy at hearing of Skifander at all, when she expected the entire country to have disappeared for good. There is nothing weird about the feelings or the words, only the change of clothes is strange. But it makes sense for her to use clothes in different ways than other people do when she can change them at will. Frowning and changing her dress are probably the same thing to her. And what's she done lately? The woman runs one of the major European powers, and many details hint at her having a pretty tight leash on political matters. She's a very old, very powerful person who is revered as an almost goddess. That'd give anyone a peculiar view of life. She probably sees other humans as cute little idiot ants more than anything else. If anything is off with her, it's that. But I expect her brains to be in perfect working order. MasakoRei (talk) 07:28, February 28, 2018 (UTC) ::::I think it is not entirely unlikely that the clothing change is not entirely a conscious act but more a subconscious one. It might have started as something that started as a act needing some concentration but ended up being something that just reflects her mood and what she is doing (simular to Zeetha's headband). Albia, being powerful enough that (according to Wooster) going against her is literally impossible, could afford that kind of eccentricities. Also, it might not be that usual with visitors from outside England? Agge.se (talk) 16:13, February 28, 2018 (UTC) P.P.S. "To save Skifander from the grey witch..." In Narnia it was a white witch. (And, yeah, it was the Lion who died.) But the Lion did often walk next to a Queen. Bkharvey (talk) 05:46, February 28, 2018 (UTC) : I don't think we're dealing with some special race of immortal beings. You don't "lose" innate genetic abilities all that quickly, but you can certainly lose knowledge. And this is Girl Genius, all weird things are mad science. Luheia is Zeetha's ancestress, Zeetha's mother is a Spark which runs in families, Luheia was probably a Spark too and mastered whatever secret of immortality Albia is using as well. But she died unexpectedly before she could pass it on. It's possible that Lucrezia stumbled on that secret and took over the Geisterdamen's world that way. I suspect this grey witch is Lucrezia, or somehow linked to her (maybe the previous goddess of the geisterdamen?). Albia is surprised not that there's a mirror in Mechanicsburg, but that Agatha was able to pass through it. As far as Albia knows, all mirrors stopped working hundreds of years ago, and I assume she did all she could to make them work again and still failed. So a working one is huge news. Oh, and I'm pretty sure I recognize Albia's outfit in the last panels, and she dressed as a Skifandrian queen in honor of her lost fellow queen. MasakoRei (talk) 06:49, February 28, 2018 (UTC) ::I disagree. '''STRONGLY.' I think Albia is a Construct. One that can control her own molecular structure. A Construct as Goddess? Deus Ex Machina. A God from the Machine, indeed. BTW--a Construct that can control its own molecular structure could do everything Albia has done, and would be immortal. Bosda Di'Chi (talk) 11:49, February 28, 2018 (UTC) Hey, what's your bet, will they find out where Skifander is, or will they get there by fixing the mirrors? Bkharvey (talk) 17:06, March 1, 2018 (UTC) ::: Given that Zeetha (probably) didn't come from Skifander using the mirrors, it should be possible to get back without using them. It might be something like the barrier that keeps the Europeans out of the Americas but that have degraded during the years. Also, I find it weird that not one of Albia's agents reported the existence of a green-haired girl with weird swords if she had them keeping an eye out. I am imagining that Wooster was issued a small book filled with things to report if he noticed. Agge.se (talk) 20:33, March 1, 2018 (UTC) ::: Well, we're told waaaaaay back when Agatha joins Master Payne's circus, that Zeetha left Skifander via airship, and we see a glimpse of that airship being attacked by Dupree's pirate gang, and it's pretty big. Unless the mirrors are large enough to pass an airship through, Skifander is likely to be somewhere on Earth. As for Albia's agents, they're ordered to be alert to rumors of Skifandria's location, not for the presence of Skifandrians in Europa. ::: ::: As for bets, I'm looking at whether or not Agatha manages to at least halt, if not actually reverse, the sinking of England. She seems to have a knack for getting stalled initiatives moving forward in very short timespans wherever she goes: She knocked Castle Heterodyne into working order in a very few days (though it seemed like months :p, and that one's kind of a special case since it's her castle), she got Moxana out of her funk and Tinka on her feet, she found Van Rijn's hermitorium, she got the Corbetite Master Train working, and I'm sure there are other things I'm forgetting. Jagerdraught Braumeister (talk) 20:51, March 1, 2018 (UTC) The Lady Wore Black Victorian Mourning Customs apply. Naturally. Bosda Di'Chi (talk) 11:48, March 1, 2018 (UTC) A linguistic question In panel 6, Zeetha says "Only, I don't actually know how to get home." In my dialect (grew up in New York), you can't use "only" in that context; it would have to be that Albia asked Zeetha when she's going back home, and Zeetha could say "I'd love to go home, only I don't know..." So it's used exactly like "but," namely it has to be connected with a superordinate clause and there's no comma pause after it when spoken. Zeetha's sentence would have to be "The thing is, I don't actually know..." So the question is, do any of you speak a dialect in which Zeetha's sentence is grammatical (in the linguist's sense, not that it obeys the rules in the books, but that a native speaker might say it)? And if so, where did you grow up? Bkharvey (talk) 23:09, March 1, 2018 (UTC) I assumed this was a mistake in layout. In the previous panel the Queen says "It is good to hear that Skifander itself still holds." It would be idiomatic for Zeetha to respond, "Only yes, but I don't actually know how to get home. Do--do you know where it is?" It looks to me like Zeetha's two sentences of dialogue there got switched around. : In British English it works. It's sort of a shortened form of "I only ask because..." 20:35, March 2, 2018 (UTC) :It sounds fine to me the way it is (I'm from the American Midwest). To me it sounds slightly apologetic, signifying something like "You might not want to answer my question, but the reason I ask is..." 07:19, July 4, 2018 (UTC)